Doctors Discouraging Push for Cancer Screenings

"The celebrity endorsement oversimplifies what is a complex decision that has pluses and minuses and no obvious answer," said Dr. H. Gilbert Welch, a co-author of the paper and an internist at the Department of Veterans Affairs medical center in White River Junction, Vermont. "But the celebrity endorsement makes it seem as if it were a no-brainer."
Counterintuitive as it may sound, it's sometimes better not to find out about cancer, the researchers said. Some cancers are likely to resolve themselves without treatment, and some patients may be likely to die of another ailment before cancer becomes an issue. A third reason for patients to be wary of cancer screenings is that the risk of false positives seems to increase with more screenings.